Electrophoretic mobility of a water-in-oil droplet separately affected by the net charge and surface charge density

Abstract

Water-in-oil emulsions and droplets exhibit completely different physico-chemical properties compared to oil-in-water emulsions and droplets. Thus, directly applying a standard theoretical model to water-in-oil systems cannot describe these anomalous properties. Here, the electrophoretic mobility of a water-in-oil droplet is analytically investigated using Debye-H\"uckel linearization and neglecting Marangoni effect. The resulting electrophoretic mobility is shown to be separately dependent on the net charge of the droplet and the surface charge density at the droplet interface. Furthermore, when the net charge is negligible, electrophoretic mobility is proportional to the surface charge density with a negative coefficient. This indicates that the internal electric double layer inversely contributes the electrophoresis. This theory is applied to experimental data of water-in-oil emulsions and droplets in the literature, and qualitative and quantitative verification of the theory is discussed.